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Sunday, September 20, 2009

Some of you might be scratching your head and saying, "Has Chris lost his 'effing mind? EVERYTHING he cooks is on that Big Green Egg thing he won't shut up about!"

Yeah, but most of that has been grilling which is a very different from BBQ and smoking. Neither is better, it's like asking which of your children you love the best.

So today, I smoked a St. Louis trimmed spare rib with a mix of hickory and apple wood. I gave it a cherry glaze at the 4 1/2 hour mark and they were OMG good.

I won't go into all of the details but here is a tip from Billy Bones himself:In the last 30 minutes of cooking your ribs, glaze them with a half and half mix of your favorite BBQ sauce and cherry preserves. Mix it up good in a blender to chop the cherry pieces up real good. (These are even better if you use his XXX Cherry Rub mixed with your favorite rib rub.)

Rib finishing on the Egg. If you notice a blue tint to the picture, it's because the picture was taken underneath a blue tent. The reason for the blue tent. And the blue tint.This rib was the runt leftover from a batch I bought a few weeks ago. We cut it in half, vacuum sealed and and froze it to BBQ at a later time. Turns out, he was the best of the batch.These turned out perfectly cooked. They pulled cleanly away from the bone with each bite. "Fall off the bone" is a bad thing in the BBQ world, means the ribs are overdone. We want to get it to JUST BEFORE that point.Look at that pretty pink smoke ring around the edges. MmmmI haven't been very happy with the last 2 or 3 batches of ribs I've done. These made up for that!

As a trained KCBS judge(certified, never judged yet!) Three 9's = perfect! Good observation on pull off bone cleanly, opposed to fall off bone- but if you ever BB-Q in Michigan, they tend to like them fall-off(peasants!)